Air bag leaking help!!! New driver stranded!

By now pretty sure issue solved but don’t even understand why this was questioned?
You are a company driver that is not allowed to fix anything. Call home base and wait for instructions....issue solved.

 

l had an airbag start leaking and the leak got worse every day. l disconnected the air line an put the metal end of a AAA battery in the hole then reconnected the airline. drove it a couple of days before I was able to change the bag in the parking lot of the truckstop

 

As long as it’s not leaking bad enough to keep your psi low for the brake system or its keeping the compressor running full time I’d run it. If its not hissing real loud and your not sitting on a tire you got a good chance no one at the border will notice.

 

Clamp the airline off and stop the leaking air. Drive and get it fixed! Don’t try and drive with air gushing out, you’re risking having your emergency brakes go off and send you skating down the road.

 

So you were running a trailer with only one working airbag on the axle? I would think this would a awful lot of weird stress on the axle. I’d kill the air to both bags and just run on the rubber stops before I did that.

 

A pair of airbags will not lift 24ton off the stops.. I just went thru this other day. I had to pipecap the dead bag line and use 3 to get the trailer frame off the tread and limp from my house to base, and i had to pull the rideheight link off to do it.

Full load is normally 58-62 psi with 4 bags. With 3 i needed 85 to lift it up and there wasnt enough psi in the system to do it with just 2.

I do have manual dump valves and ball valves to cut air to each axle. 2 bags will hold the trailer up if not deflated, but they wouldnt raise it. I came out in the morning to a deflated trailer that was fine when i went in the night before. Small leak in one bag wasnt enough to sink the trailer when running down the road but couldnt "get it up" next day.

 

Deflating bags under any loaded trailer is a gamble whether they are up to the task of re-inflating thats why I personally do not deflate to drop and hook. Thats what the landing gear crank is for or blocks of wood under an rgn. Bags should last 20 plus years in some climates if you don’t keep working them that hard. They usually blow at the fold in them because of that extra stress. If you park long enough that your pressure drops and the bags deflate crank the gear down to take the stress off the bags when they do deflate.
No preaching. Just experience that was passed down to me.

 

You are better off running on the stops than you are running with 3 bags. It puts awful twist forces on the axle to just have 1 airbag on one side trying to lift the axle.